Dead Cells
by pyxie blue
Summary: When you get right down to it, hair is just dead stuff, anyway.  But who is he to talk her out of her fascination with it?  Valiant
1. Chapter 1

She refuses to take her hands out of his hair, and it's distracting.

"Val," Ravus grinds out, shivering a little as she lightly scrapes the skin on the back of his neck with her ragged fingernails. "Val, I have work to do."

She grins, knocking her shoulder into his, and half-focuses on undoing the braids she created barely twenty minutes ago. "I think it was a good idea, for me to keep my hair short like this," she teases, all fire and joy and love and silliness. "It gives me more time to play with yours." Any further protest is ignored or forgotten with the feeling of her fingers on the point of his ear, wandering down his nose to brush his mouth, braiding and unbraiding and re-braiding until he's almost sure it looks like a bunch of rats have been nesting on his head.

He snaps at her teasingly as her hands come closer to his lips again. She snickers, burying her fingers into his hair and relaxing into his side contentedly. They're still for a few minutes before he says, without knowing he will, "Don't stop." And she laughs harder and keeps doing what she's been doing on and off for almost three weeks now.

This is one of their good days. And thanks be to whatever is out there that doesn't mean them harm, the good days are starting to outnumber the bad.

They watch the flames flicker in his makeshift fireplace. He's mostly sure that whatever she's thinking is full of daydreams, and partially worried that she's counting down the minutes until she has to go home again, to eat dinner with her mother and call her friends and do her schoolwork so she's still allowed to come visit. It would make him feel easier if she could not act like she was more excited about their next meeting than staying in this one a little longer, because no matter her promises he is never sure a next meeting will happen. But then she snuggles into the place where his neck meets his shoulder and he is too busy dealing with a strange protective rush of possessiveness that comes over him to worry about such things.

He's thinking of asking her to let him spend the rest of his life with her, if she'll keep her hair short enough that whatever fascination she has with the longer strands of dead cells sprouting from his head will stay intact.


	2. Chapter 2

Lips don't actually burn when they kiss you, not anywhere, even if it's the person you've been secretly lusting after for entirely too long, unless you've got a gash across it and whoever is kissing you has just been sucking lemons or eating French fries. And that's hardly a sexy way, though it isn't exactly uncomfortable. There's something thrilling in that kind of pain.

At least, this is the way it has so far appeared to Val. Ravus' fangs sometimes scratch her skin, but she doesn't mind, because it's that kind of thrill. The citrus-in-a-small-wound way. The French-fry-remnants-in-a-scratch way (although admittedly just about anything to do with French fries is bearable at the bare minimum, because really, they're delicious). Because of this, or perhaps in spite of it, she's determined to force upon him the joys of fast food restaurants, one McDonalds copy at a time. Often, they are interspersed with diners, because Ravus is only so patient with the world of mortals and at least at diners they have pretend privacy.

The third Burger King and the seventeenth time they go out as a "normal" couple, he capitulates.

"I will admit that though their taste is tainted by iron and chemicals and they were removed from the actual potatoes from whence they came a good bit longer than I am organically comfortable with, those French fries you're so very proud of are utterly irresistible if one has been exposed to them enough times." There are enough qualifiers on that sentence that it's practically its own diplomatic treaty from Faerie to Ironside (which, yes, makes her snicker a little, but he thinks he's being funny so she lets him).

She kisses him, hard and quickly, and his fangs scratch her lips slightly and the salt from his French fries makes them burn and she _likes it_ this way.


End file.
